Vassar Scholarship

From 1896 to 1909, a system of sewage disposal existed on the Vassar farm, purifying sewage through sandy soils and irrigating the adjacent crop fields. This system was ecologically innovative in its time and Ellen Swallow Richards, a Vassar alumna...

Arbitrage pressures that could equalize closed-end fund share prices with fund portfolio values appear to be largely absent in an extensive data set. Observed fund behavior violates the static arbitrage bounds of Gemmill and Thomas (2002) and is inconsistent with...

The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset...

Previous papers find no relationship between interest rates and the discounts of US closed-end funds before 1985. This is taken as evidence against management fees being a cause of discounts because a negative relationship is expected: if interest rates rise...

The McCartys Flow is a 3.9-ka vesicular porphyritic basalt lava flow in the Zuni-Bandera Volcanic Field (ZBVF) near Grants, New Mexico. The Lava Falls area on the southern part of the flow is dominated by pahoehoe sheet flows. Topographic features...

This paper establishes a relationship between levels of dollariza- tion and the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. We show that low dollarized economies experience an appreciation of currency from an increase in fiscal stimulus this causes a positive wealth effect leading...

This paper is based on the notion that the nature of current labor market informalization requires rethinking in order to guide action and formulate social policies for eliminating poverty and reducing economic inequality and job insecurity. It explores conceptually and...

There are numerous examples of assets with identical payout streams being priced differently. These violations of the law of one price result from two factors. First, investors have heterogeneous asset valuations so that if two groups of investors trade in...

Arbitrage positions that benefit from the reversion of closed-end fund discounts to rational levels show excess returns that increase in magnitude the more funds are mispriced. At the same time, fund trading volumes and bid-ask spreads more than double as...

The behavior of US closed-end funds is very different from that of the UK funds studied by Gemmill and Thomas (2002). There is no evidence that their discounts are constrained by arbitrage barriers, no evidence that higher expenses increase discounts...

The reaction of closed-end fund share prices to changes in portfolio values is on average the same whether funds are trading at discounts or premia and whether the changes in portfolio values are positive or negative. If closed-end fund discounts...

The larger a closed-end fund's premium over its portfolio value, the more intensely it is sold short. However, the intensity of short selling affects neither the rate at which premia mean revert to fundamental values nor the rate of return...

This paper argues that the degree to which a given industry's labor contracts are complete or incomplete is the major factor determining whether its workforce will be unionized. For instance, assembly line industries feature complete labor contracts because of the...